The art of...adapting

Don't believe the myth: morning people can become night people, and vice versa, if the city you're in is assertive enough, says ANNA HART.

- ANNA HART

I AM INTENSELY MISTRUSTFUL OF THE dichotomies and binaries presented to us under the guise of fun character indicators or behavioural cues. When someone chattily asks if I’m a beach or mountain person, a cat or dog person, a tea or coffee person, I hear Julius Caesar ominously growling, “divide and conquer.” I hear fascist dictators trying to make us rat on our neighbours for being different, I hear nefarious advertising execs trying to sell us stuff we don’t need. Admittedly I listen to way too many history podcasts, but society doesn’t need any more division, okay? And my heart is big enough for more than one species of demanding domesticated mammal! I refuse to choose between cats and dogs.

One frequently cited personality trait binary that seems to have more credence, however, is whether we are a night owl or an early bird. We've all read that our chronotype dictates our circadian rhythm, and some scientists theorise that these differences were beneficial in our early hunter-gatherer days, because there was always someone awake, to keep an eye out for irate woolly mammoths, while the other half of the tribe slept.